How We Did Online in the 90s

Spinning newspaper animation: It was the 1990s! Anyone could create a website and people would be sorta impressed! And if you posted words and pictures on your website? That you wrote and created yourself? Well now, maybe you had yourself a publication! Not a real publication of course, since those still came on paper. But websites! Truly the wave of the future, of that past.

It was during this heady age of innovation that my still-social-media-averse friend Scott Hollifield and I decided to create website, or webzine, called Xora. Later it was called Wordgun. We ran weird stories we wrote and others written by our friends. There was no mission statement, no agenda, no business model. One friend who was teaching air force survival in Saudi Arabia and making tons of money sent us a check for $600 as an “investment,” which we eventually paid back precisely with the $600 received from selling off the xora.com domain. So we had break-even exit, which is better than most media companies!

Sadly, the site’s bleached bones are only occasionally visible poking up in dark corners of the Internet Wayback Machine, images long lost and most links broken as illustrated in this email. After going through the Xora/Wordgun text archives, I recruited Scott for a “Glory Days” nostalgia trip on what it was like launching and running a web publication in the pre-millennial epoch.

Chris Mohney: So to set the scene, as I recall we started talking about doing an online webzine in the fall of 1997, not long after I moved back to Birmingham once I finished grad school out in Washington State. What were you doing at the time? Do you remember anything about how the idea got started?

Scott Hollifield: Well I think I was working at my dull data graphics job and otherwise bumming around Birmingham. As I recall, you basically came to me with the general idea of doing an online "zine". The name "Xora" came from a surreal fake pharmaceutical ad that I designed for no good reason.

CM: I forgot about the origin of the Xora name! Was this when you were working for the company that designed the touchscreens for prisons? I remember you found that folder of old buttons that appeared to have a button for summoning guards to beat up inmates.

SH: Correct! Also an icon to turn on or off the power to the electric chair.

CM: Very nice. Maybe we should have adopted that aesthetic. What do you remember about how we decided what we'd publish on Xora? I vaguely recall us thinking of it as a less nerdy, more hip version of BTN (“Birmingham Telecommunications Newsletter") from the old BBS days.

Here was our "About" language from the first issue of Xora:

Xora is an alternative webzine based in Birmingham, Alabama. We are dedicated to promoting articulate, narrative commentary on human culture, focusing loosely on Birmingham and the South, but including national or world issues as appropriate. No particular point of view is promoted at the expense of another. Xora covers subjects including (but not limited to) politics, social issues, entertainment, media, arts, reviews, technology, and more. The only standards are quality, originality, and an insistence upon a personal voice in every piece of writing.

SH: I think we had a vague agreement that we would take pretty much anything as long as it was about a thousand words in length and had some kind of point to it. This was a step above the old newsletter's standards which published anything from local concert listings to epic wandering monomaniacal rants.

I remember there was great controversy with one of our mutual friends, who was offended that his writing submissions would now be met with editorial scrutiny.

CM: Yes, we were trying to not get too polished but at least have ... some detectable polish.

It was fortunate I had just finished a creative writing grad school program and could bully all my fellow students to contribute, since that made up 90% of our submissions.

The first issue of Xora had a real... let's say "diverse" range of articles, from my hacky takedown of the local newspaper website to a sort of cocktail bar review. And a love letter to Carolina livermush, among other things. Our friend Beth wrote a zany horoscope. And it also featured the inaugural Must Be Destroyed, a larval attempt to create an easy recurring feature. The first MBD targeted a local DJ and seems less mean-spirited and more dumb, reading it now. But there were later versions I thought were really funny, especially the ones you wrote.

SH: Cocktail bar reviews! Horoscopes! That's even more diverse than I remembered. And I fondly remember Must Be Destroyed as an awesome idea in the context of what we were doing. It was supposed to be the ultimate primal takedown, even if the target was something petty, like a local shopping mall.

CM: In fact I think the MBDs got better when the target was innocent and wholesome, like Tom Hanks. One of my favorites was when you wrote “John Glenn Must Be Destroyed,” which began with something like "Let's shoot an old man into the sun."

Another that I wrote, about artist George Rodrigue's famous Blue Dog paintings. Somehow his wife found the post—remarkable in itself in that pre-Google Alert age—and wrote us an anguished email asking how anyone could hate the Blue Dog so much. I felt bad!

SH: These days, she would have found you on Twitter and drawn an army of thousands to assault you.

CM: And rightly so, for let me just say that George Rodrigue (RIP) was widely admired and beloved.

What was your sense for how Xora was received... either among our friends and contributors, the audience, whatever? Do you recall how you felt about it at the time?

SH: I'm not sure how it was received in general, but I might characterize it as a mix of indulgent amusement and mild admiration for having any kind of a running web site at all. It was the late '90s and anything you put online was impressive just for being online, unless it was a MySpace page.

As for how I felt, even though we had a slack monthly production schedule—which would have been generous for a hand-printed 1970s zine, much less something of the digital era—I became immediately stressed under the obligation of regularly having to come up with something half-interesting to write about, as well as what effort was involved in administering the website itself.

At the same time, I think I had this misguided notion where the goal was to become some equivalent of Salon or Slate or something like that. Now when I think on it, I'm not sure that ever should have been the idea, but I do wish we'd gone crazier in more ways and produced a dozen or two additional "Must Be Destroyed" type ideas.

CM: Oh I think we would have loved to become a real publication, but of course that was before I had any concrete media business experience to even begin to think of how that might work. And despite our enthusiasm I don't recall either of us being ready to quit our day jobs and invest all our time and savings into our online webzine. I like to think we a were a cut above many other dilettantes but maybe not by much.

Now we both did writing but you also designed the site and its various graphical widgetry which was quite a bit more cumbersome back in those days. Do you remember what your Design Process was like? Did you have deep thoughts about it or what you were doing? anything stand out that you were particularly happy/mad about?

SH: As I recall, the original design for "Xora" consisted of a logo that I Photoshopped up, plus swathing the site in purple, which was a color I chose because I didn't see it prominently on too many other websites. Once we switched to "Wordgun," there was another new logo, and we lost the purple and went multi-chromatic. Apart from that, there wasn't much else to it except memories of wrestling with Dreamweaver and Microsoft FrontPage to make the webpages do as I wanted. I am pretty pleased that we didn't rely on any templates … it was all hand-written, which is how I still like to work.

CM: I forgot that the whole site was basically hard-coded. Badass.

So now we come to the point of our chronicle where we pivoted! We didn't even know what pivoting was. More accurately this was probably a rebrand? from "Xora" to "Wordgun."

It appears from the archives I've been able to find that the last "issue" of Xora was May 1998, and Wordgun appeared in August 1998, but I can't confirm it precisely... I think there might be a missing month of either or both in there.

I can't recall much about the decision to make that change, though i do seem to think the rebrand had to do with being more aggressive. I think our tagline was something like "the online magazine of aggressive writing" or something like that?

SH: I'm not sure, but I think the shift was borne out of an innate feeling, on my part at least, that "Xora" was just a meaningless made-up word, and that we should have a more provocative name. However "Wordgun" might have been a bit an overreach, with the "gun" imagery promising a level of intensity that we would not quite be able to meet.

But yeah my memory is that we took a month off for the "rebranding" and then continued much as before.

CM: It's a bizarre time capsule (to me) looking over the Wordgun articles from that era. You wrote four pages about blaming bad weather on God, and another couple about how the live-action Scooby-Doo movie would be bad. I attempted to write something about independent counsel Ken Starr vs Bill Clinton that is now borderline incomprehensible to me, as well my Tori Amos fandom. Meanwhile we were still running dispatches from my friends living in Korea and Maine and Seattle, and our friend Beth's painstakingly convoluted horoscopes, etc. etc. etc.

The "aggressive" angle was already looking a little forced in places. The last Must Be Destroyed was written by me about Furby, for god's sake.

SH: Well as I recall, the bulk of our attention ended up being focused on matters of popular culture. A quick glance at some of my other articles reminds me that I also weighed in on matters pertaining to Planet of the Apes, Mr. Show, and Out of Sight. (And my Scooby-Doo article was actually 99% in praise of the original series, more than it was about the live-action movie.) But your mention of Ken Starr reminds me that for all our youth, we were documenting the innocent days of the Clinton era, as well as before much of the change that's since come to the digital world. There was no Facebook, no YouTube, no Twitter. Just really the wild wild World Wide Web!

CM: Even Amazon barely existed back then! It was such an innocent time on the internet, but only in retrospect. Everyone thought the internet was for nerds and/or 99% frivolous. Certainly far fewer respectable media were investing much resources in their online presences, which made it seem possible we could do something consequential or at least impactful with our spare-time website.

So what is your recollection of why we shut it down? I don't remember any particular incident other than generally getting bored with the routine, seeing only occasional positive bumps in audience, running out of friends to bully into writing for free. I do seem to recall you and I bickering more and more about the project, not over anything high level but just both of us taking out our annoyance on little things.

SH: As I recall, what did us in was the shrinking pool of available talent to which you allude, as well as a growing lack of interest in general. I don't know if you remember this part but we actually took two one-month breaks: one to rebrand as Wordgun, and then another at the end of our first year of publication. The fact that we were occasionally having to recharge our batteries on a MONTHLY online publication was a signal to me that maybe this wasn't what I wanted to spend most of my time on. The entire project was useful to me personally because it pointed the way towards the realization that I cared more about the design of the little floating bits of text and graphics on the screen themselves than I did about what was actually written.

CM: That squares up with what I recall. So beyond gaining that insight about what you got a charge out of creatively, do you think that was pretty much the limit of the endeavor's value? Or should we have gone full startup bro, quit our jobs, maxed our credit cards, looked for investment and tried to actually make a Real Company? There are uncountable failures from that era (like any), but it was also one of the easier times to get scrappy funding for little sites with no business model. I'm dubious myself but would be lying if I didn't have occasional pangs about what might have been.

SH: No, I think there was the potential for a lot more value there, but not only would we have had to go all-in the way you describe, but I think we would've needed the luxury to be able to fail in all kinds of ways as we groped our way towards success. Mainly I think we could have transitioned into something viable if we had found ways to generate and solicit 50 or 100x more content, as well as compensate appropriately for same. Along the way we hopefully could have sharpened our vision into something truly distinctive and maybe, who knows, caught flame with something that got people's attention one day. What coulda been!